Amy Sillman: Alternate Side (Permutations #1–32)
Long-term view, Dia Bridgehampton
Overview
For over three decades, Amy Sillman has created allover compositions across media in which figurative elements emerge from and recede behind abstract forms through an iterative process of layering and redaction, resulting in “an open field, where figure and ground are in very ambivalent, complex relationships.” For her Dia Bridgehampton exhibition, Sillman reimagines the relationship between figure and ground, using the gallery wall as a literal ground on which the improvisational and systematic coalesce. Alternate Side (Permutations #1–32) departs from a question: Can printmaking itself serve as a model and method for a whole room? The resulting installation features a newly commissioned, site-specific work painted and screenprinted directly onto the gallery walls, superimposed with a unique series of monotypes created during Sillman’s 2024–25 residency at Two Palms, a New York print studio. Taken together, these distinct yet integrated components demonstrate Sillman’s ability to toggle back and forth between media as well as between improvisational and systematic approaches while combining conceptual rigor with tongue-in-cheek humor.
Amy Sillman: Alternate Side (Permutations #1–32) is curated by Jordan Carter, curator and co–department head, with Emily Markert, curatorial associate.
Amy Sillman: Alternate Side (Permutations #1–32) is made possible by generous support from Every Page Foundation and Gladstone Gallery. Additional support by Philip E. Aarons and Shelley Fox Aarons, Chrissy and Lee Broughton, Melony and Adam Lewis, David Schwartz Foundation, Inc., and those who wish to remain anonymous.
All exhibitions at Dia are made possible by the Economou Exhibition Fund.
Amy Sillman was born in Detroit in 1955. She is renowned for her painting-based multidisciplinary work, encompassing drawing, printmaking, animation, writing, and site-specific projects, and infusing abstraction with humor, formal and conceptual questions, and a rigorous physicality. Sillman has presented her work at institutions such as the Art Institute of Chicago; Camden Art Centre, London; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Portikus, Frankfurt; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Recent exhibitions include the Venice Biennale: The Milk of Dreams (2022) and Amy Sillman: Oh, Clock!, a solo show alongside a curatorial project with the museums’ collections, at Kunstmuseum Bern, Switzerland (2024–25), and on view through August at the Ludwig Forum in Aachen, Germany (2025). In 2019, she curated The Shape of Shape as part as the Artist’s Choice series at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Sillman also regularly publishes her writing on art; her book Faux Pas: Selected Writings and Drawings, published by After 8 Books in 2020, is now in its fourth reprint. A long-time educator, Sillman was the co-chair of the MFA Painting program at Bard College, Annandale-On-Hudson, New York, from 1997 to 2013 and a professor at the Städelschule, Frankfurt, from 2015 to 2019. She lives in New York.
Artist
Amy Sillman
Amy Sillman was born in Detroit in 1955. She lives in New York City.